A typical wireless communication system includes one or more base stations that radiate to define wireless coverage areas in which to serve mobile stations according to a radio access technology such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA (e.g., Long Term Evolution (LTE) or Wireless Operability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) (e.g., 1×RTT and 1×EV-DO), GSM, GPRS, UMTS, EDGE, TDMA, AMPS, MMDS, WIFI, and BLUETOOTH, or others now known or later developed. Each base station may then be coupled with network infrastructure that provides connectivity with one or more transport networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and/or the Internet for instance. With this arrangement, a wireless communication device (WCD) within coverage of the system could engage in air interface communication with one or more base stations and could thereby communicate via the base station(s) with various remote network entities or with other WCDs served by the base station(s) or by other base stations.
One of the more important features of modern wireless communication systems is the ability to determine the location of a WCD. Knowledge of a WCD's location could help facilitate various location-based services.
WCD location could be determined in various ways, and with varying levels of granularity. In a typical arrangement, for instance, the system could generally estimate WCD location by triangulating based on signal delay between the WCD and each of three base stations, using signal delay with respect to each base station as a measure of distance of the WCD from the base station, and deeming the WCD's location to be within an area of overlap of circles with radii equal to those distances. Further, the system could determine the WCD's location with more granularity, such as by having the WCD tune to Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites in the sky over the WCD's generally determined location, and using signals received from the satellites to precisely triangulate the WCD's location.